When it comes to university sports, it doesn’t get any more pathological than the University of Kentucky, a perennially corrupt player constantly featured on this blog.

These details from the Eric Smart scientific misconduct scandal on that campus round out the picture of UK as one of America’s most third-world universities, featuring not only an intensely corrupt athletics division, but a high-profile research lab whose now-disgraced director seems to have been protected by people in the administration.

Tim Bricker, the former chair of pediatrics, wrote [Smart] a recommendation letter to the state’s teacher certification agency, calling him “an outstanding teacher.” Bricker is thought to have also removed a letter of reprimand from Smart’s personnel file that detailed his yearlong probation for sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment in his lab.

Recently a small local foundation without a program officer donated nearly one-fourth its assets to research. I know enough about the situation to hazard a judgment. The seven-figure sum will be completely wasted because the beneficiaries will be unable to overcome very strong institutional and professional biases. (Imagine donating money for plastics research to a faculty with professional and financial ties to the metals industry. You don’t know it, and they won’t tell you. But they take your money.)